John Wayne Gacy, (born March 17, 1942, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died May 10, 1994, Statesville, Ill.) American serial killer whose murders of 33 boys and young men in the 1970s received international media attention and shocked his suburban Chicago community, where he was known for his sociability and his performance as a clown at charitable events and childrens’ parties.

Gacy was born into a blue-collar family and seems to have had a fairly ordinary childhood. But he exhibited a growing tendency toward sadism, which resulted in several encounters with the law in the 1960s. In 1968, after his conviction for sexually assaulting a teenage boy, he was confined in the Iowa State Men’s Reformatory (Anamosa State Penitentiary) and forced to undergo psychological evaluation. After his release in 1970 and while still on parole, he was again arrested for sexual assault, but the charges were later dropped. Gacy then became a fairly successful independent contractor and bought a house in suburban Chicago.

In 1978, after one of Gacy’s victims, Robert Piest, was reported missing, police learned that Gacy was the last person known to have seen him. After obtaining a search warrant, police discovered the bodies of 29 boys and young men in a crawl space beneath Gacy’s house. Indeed, the area of the house had emitted a foul stench for years, but Gacy had told his houseguests and his wife that the smell was the result of moisture buildup. At his trial Gacy’s plea of innocent by reason of insanity was supported by the testimony of several psychologists, who diagnosed him as schizophrenic, but was rejected by the jury, which found him guilty of all 33 murders of which he was accused; he was executed by lethal injection in 1994.

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...in the news media. Some murderers became known by lurid nicknames, such as the Boston Strangler, the Düsseldorf Vampire (Peter Kürten), the Monster of Florence, and the Killer Clown (John Wayne Gacy). Their crimes, which both horrified and fascinated the public, raised numerous social and legal issues, such as the tendency of police to be less thorough in murder investigations...